Wolverines: standard cell placement on a network of workstations

The typical computer-aided design environment today consists of a number of workstations connected by a high-speed local area network. The authors present a placement program that makes use of this distributed computing environment to achieve linear speedup without sacrificing the quality of the results obtained by the serial version of this program. The placement program is based on the genetic algorithm which is a heuristic search method inspired by biological evolution models. The authors describe the implementation of the placement program and detailed experimental studies of the behavior of the algorithm